The present invention relates generally to equalization of received signals in a mobile communication system and, more particularly, to an equalizer for a receiver in a single carrier frequency division multiple access (SC-FDMA) system.
Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) is an attractive technique for sharing an available radio resource with multiple users in a high-speed wireless data communication system. Since each subcarrier of an OFDMA signal is simply scaled by a complex-valued scalar after passing through a time dispersive channel, demodulation can be performed for each subcarrier individually, and hence equalization is not needed in the receiver. Moreover, through the use of a cyclic prefix, orthogonality among different subcarriers is preserved even if they are not completely synchronized so long as the relative time delay is limited. This property is particularly desirable for uplink communications because users assigned to different subcarriers are typically only coarsely time aligned.
A major drawback of OFDMA is the high peak-to-average-power ratio (PAR), or equivalently, the high crest factor (CF) (square root of PAR) of the transmitted waveform, which can cause undesired out-of-band radiation and/or inefficient power amplification in mobile terminals. Because of this limitation, Single-Carrier Frequency Division Multiple Access (SC-FDMA), whose transmitted waveforms have considerably lower peak-to-average-power ratio (PAR) than those of OFDMA, has recently been selected by 3GPP as the standard access method for the uplink (UL) in Evolved UTRA. The low PAR property of SC-FDMA signals enables the mobile terminals to transmit at higher efficiency while reducing undesired out-of-band emissions.
In an SC-FDMA system, there are two different methods of allocating subcarriers to different users, referred to as the localized or the distributed allocations. The former method allocates contiguous subcarriers to each individual user. This method requires less pilot overhead for channel estimation but provides limited frequency diversity for each user. The second method allocates subcarriers that are evenly distributed over the spectrum assigned to each user. It provides more frequency diversity but generally requires more pilot overhead for channel estimation. Both carrier allocation methods result in transmitted signals that have significantly lower PAR than conventional OFDMA signals.
Unlike conventional OFDMA systems, where the modulated symbols transmitted over different frequency tones can be demodulated independently of other symbols at the receiver, SC-FDMA requires an equalizer at the receiver to compensate for the frequency selectivity of the channel in order to demodulate the transmitted symbols. Although it is well known that a time-domain maximum likelihood sequence estimation (MLSE) equalizer is optimal in this situation, the complexity of such an equalizer will be exorbitant for the high transmission rates expected in E-UTRA. Consequently, a reduced-complexity, suboptimal frequency-domain equalizer is needed for SC-FDMA.